During Intuit’s 33rd flight, something stuck to one of its landing legs and hung down. NASA/JPL-Caltech
At the end of September, the “Wit” drone, which was exploring life on Mars with the “Perseverance” rover in the “Jezero” crater on the surface of Mars, completed its 33rd flight. And in the video taken during its flight, ground controllers found that something strange was stuck to it.
The thing attached to the “Wit” was blurry. It hung from one of Intent’s landing legs and wafted in the wind. Then it suddenly disappeared midway through the flight.
Ground controllers said that remote sensing data from the “Intuit” showed that everything was normal, and there was no indication that the “Intuit” was damaged. Efforts are being made to identify what this unidentified foreign object is. It would be strange if it wasn’t something that came off the Wit.
“Wit” is the first human alien airlift vehicle. Its mission has been “severely overrun”. It was intended to fly only five times on Mars, but the actual number of flights has been nearly seven times that of the original plan.
The Perseverance rover that brought it to Mars is now exploring an ancient estuary delta. “Perseverance” is collecting samples and storing them so that future probes or human astronauts can find them, bring these samples back to Earth, and use more complete laboratories on Earth to explore whether ancient Mars once had life.
Intuit’s main mission is to conduct “extreme tests”. NASA hopes to use this technology on future Mars sample return missions. But this time it’s already playing a scout role for Perseverance to some extent.
Exactly what is sticking to the landing legs of Ingenuity is really unknown. It looks like cobwebs or membranes, or some kind of slime, but how could there be cobwebs, membranes, and slime on distant Mars?
During Intuit’s 33rd flight, something stuck to one of its landing legs. The video was captured by a camera on the belly of Wit. Unidentified adherent is located at the end of the landing leg in the upper right corner. NASA/JPL-Caltech
A plausible explanation is that perhaps this strange thing is a piece of garbage, some kind of debris that fell off the surface of the rover when Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere, and was just stepped on by the landing legs of Wit. Or blown by the air currents aroused by the propellers, and hung on the landing legs of Ingenuity.
Not long ago, experts worried that as more and more probes arrive on Mars, more and more debris, debris and waste will be left on the surface of Mars. Once a pure land, Mars is slowly turning into a giant garbage dump.
But what exactly this strange alien is remains to be seen.
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